Google Adwords - The Content Network

In preparation for the advertizing bump due in a little over two weeks, I've started looking at little harder at statistics, and at some of the other options. One of the easier things I can test out is to turn the Google 'content network' back on, as this is known to bring in a lot of web page hits for not a huge amount of cash. I've been fiddling with this for the last couple of days. But it's clear that the content network has some problems:

1) Even after these last couple of days, I still don't have things set up properly.

The content network has huge numbers of impressions, and above certain thresholds it's possible to blow your entire advertising budget for the day in a -very- short period of time. I've finally got it cranked back far enough that I don't run out for the day, but it's still about four times higher than the level I'm shooting for.

My advice if you're going to use the content network is to start out at $0.01 and raise it up by a penny a day until you figure out the appropriate level for what you're trying to do.

2) Content network click rates are stupidly low.

Expect at best one tenth the click through rate of regular adwords ads. Rates like 0.04% (four clicks per ten thousand impressions) so far seem typical.

3) Content network clicks are damn near worthless.

If you don't have some way of tracking or testing content clicks for click through, you're fooling yourself. Keep in mind that there's a fundamental difference between someone searching for information, and someone presented with information incidentally while they're looking for something else.

Regular adwords suffers much less from this problem than the content network, because of 1) the negative feedback ad system which kills bad ads, and 2) because people searching for something are still looking for something instead of being shoved things they don't care about.

My own experience and statistics for this show that the content network is 10 times (!) less likely to result in a saved character or a new player than regular adwords search traffic. Price your content ads to reflect the difference for your own site.

4) Content clicks can be gamed, sometimes badly.

I have so far had only one serious incident of content network click fraud, but it can and will happen if you run an extended campaign or one with wide coverage. Sometimes, Google will refund and clear the damage to your account; in my case, they did nothing, even though it was clearly and obviously fraudulent.

The only recommendation I can give for this is set your daily limit to the lowest possible value that still serves everything you want to serve. Then watch carefully for days when the budget is exhausted more quickly than usual. Assume there will be no recovery for click fraud; your only recourse is to limit the damage.

Google Click Fraud Update

I just got an email back from Google saying that they have re-evaluated my case based on newer information. Apparently the site that got me started getting a lot of other people too, and eventually Google was able to put together enough evidence to prove it and take care of it.

I suspect they have a multiple-tier system for handling this sort of thing, so that even though you might be ignored at first, eventually things get straightened out. Anyway, looks like things are back to normal.

But I'm still not comfortable using the content network.

Google Adwords Click Fraud

The final verdict on the Google Adwords click fraud incident I encountered a few weeks ago appears to be "declare it not our fault and have the customer eat it". I don't really blame them for not handling everything perfectly, but this is such an unusual circumstance that I have to believe they would pursue it harder.

Or perhaps its common to them, and only unusual to me.

Either way, I will not be using the content network in the future unless I restrict it very, very heavily. I might not use it at all - it really didn't bring me many decent hits anyway. I've hardly noticed a difference in the download numbers since it's been off.

My recommendation: the main Google search listings are fine, but avoid the content network unless you're willing to get bitten occasionally. I'll definitely be recommending caution with the content network to anyone who wants to listen to me.

Google Adwords Click Fraud

It appears that after several years, I have finally been bitten by the Google Adwords "click fraud" that I have heard so much about. It only cost me 60 dollars (on about a 36 hour window mind you, I'll explain that later), but it's still irritating.

I discovered this while I was showing off all the neat features of Google Analytics to Fionna's boss last Friday. The first thing I noticed on login was that web traffic was way up due to the Adwords content network, and a quick check showed that the budget for Adwords was completely blown (I have it set to the minimum of 20 dollars a day.) Given that the normal budget is around 2-3 dollars, this was very unusual.

I thought at first that maybe some big gaming site had linked to us, but that doesn't make any sense - adwords doesn't work that way. After some hunting around, Fionna's boss and I found that almost all of the new hits were from china, almost all of them were for very short or zero time, and hardly any of them clicked on any other links. In short, I got a boat load of hits from people who were either totally uninterested, or (as we found out later) simply couldn't read english.

I contacted google, who eventually responded back saying that everything looks fine, and that the traffic was routed from game.7679.com, a valid gaming site. Except that:

7679.com is entirely in Chinese, for a Chinese audience, in China, and the ad that was displayed to users with an astonishingly high click through rate was targetted for blind/visually impaired english speaking players using screen readers.

Does anyone see the problem with this?

The fight with Google is ongoing, and now that I have posted this and cleared my thoughts a little bit, I'm actually more irritated about it than before. Time for another nasty note.

(Regarding the 60 dollar loss - I got unlucky in this regard. I had checked it Wednesday afternoon, and the bogus traffic started on Wednesday night. They hit the site so hard that it ate the entire ad budget in only a couple of hours on Wednesday night, then the entire budget in the first couple of hours of Thursday. I neglected to check it on Thursday because I had other things going; Friday morning, the entire budget was blown in the first couple of hours, while I was sleeping. By the time we discovered it on Friday afternoon, there was little to be done other than disable the content network.)